A long the river run, p.10
A Long the River Run, page 10
In the end she gave a brief speech where she made a couple of self-deprecating comments about the travails of the years but how good it was to have so many friends who she cared about and who cared about her and, even as she was saying the words, she was thinking to herself that she hardly ever had any contact with any of these people and she had been genuinely surprised that so many had bothered to turn up and honour her like this unless it was for the free food and drinks and she felt guilty about thinking that of her friends, so to dull the guilt, started to hit the champagne pretty hard.
‘I don’t think I ever saw you as legless as you were at your birthday party’ Ingrid said as they motored up the big four lane road that ran along the creek that was glimpsed occasionally through the gaps between the towhouses that had been built where, for most of Angela’s early life, there had been rows and rows of wooden woolstores where the big merino clips from the New England would be stored before being sold at auctions and sent off to the suit makers of Italy, or to China and India if the wool was of a lesser quality.
‘I didn’t get teary though, did I?’ Angela asked.
‘No tears, you were as funny as buggery, but I don’t know if everyone appreciated your humour’ Ingrid said.
‘Well that’s their problem’ Angela said and smiled at Ingrid.
‘That’s what you told them on the night’
‘I didn’t?’ Angela asked.
Angela and Ingrid kept reminiscing about Angela’s fiftieth for quite a while and eventually they reached Maitland and crossed to the other side of the big river and Ingrid looked out the car window and was shocked.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen the river that low’ she said, ‘and brown and murky looking.’
‘It’s worse further up the valley’, Angela said grimly.
The sky had changed colour as they were getting closer to where the fires had been and where the fires were still burning and there was a yellow haze in the air that the sun was having difficulty shining through and they both commented that there weren’t a lot of people out on the street and many of those who were going about their business were wearing the white face masks that were usually seen on young Asian tourists all over the world and always made Angela wonder whether they wore the masks to stop them from catching something or to stop them spreading something, but seeing so many face masks, she wondered if the young people she had seen wearing them in the past just came from smoggy cities like Beijing or Shanghai or Jakarta and were used to wearing them.
‘Worse than Santiago on a bad day’ Ingrid, who had travelled to all sorts of places and normally on her own, commented, and Angela remembered seeing a photograph that Ingrid has posted on her social media page of Santiago on a Sunday taken from high up on San Christabel and there was a thick brown layer of smog covering the city nestled under the towering snow covered peaks of the Andes.
Angela was pleased to have good air conditioning in the car and the filters, she thought, were cleaning the worst of the particles out of the air but even in the car, with the aircon blasting and the windows up, the closer they got towards Allynsdale, the heavier the smell of smoke became and there were still a lot of fire trucks darting about and Angela thought that some of them came from interstate because of their different badges and the names of little places she thought she had passed through on one of her trips to Bendigo to visit the art gallery and wineries and to eat in the hip cafes.
When they arrived at Wallisville, there was a roadblock at the edge of town and a couple of middle-aged policemen were leaning against a Highway Patrol car with a flashing light and a digital sign telling them to stop. One of the policemen asked her what her business was in the area and she told him that she lived on the other side of Allynsdale and she was hoping to check if her house was alright.
‘Check in with the Police at Allynsdale. It’s still pretty confusing up there and I doubt if they’ll let you go any further than the town, but things might change later this afternoon’ the policeman said and handed her back her licence.
Angela and Ingrid sat in silence as they drove, Angela navigating the narrow two laned bitumen road that ran along the side of the river towards Allynsdale. It seemed that they were the only people on the road. When Angela drove down the road the day before, there had been a lot of traffic with fire fighting vehicles heading north and people who had decided to evacuate heading south but now there was just a sense of emptiness and abandonment. None of the country they were passing through had been burned that badly, but there were the odd patches of blackened grass and, in some places, it was still smoking, and Angela thought that there must have been a number of spot fires that, perhaps, were caused by embers being pushed along by the wind and landing in the dry grass. She thought that some of the fire fighting vehicles she had seen driving back and forward along the road might have been patrolling for these sort of small spot fires that, unless they’re dealt with quickly, can, given the dryness of the country and the heat in the wind, turn into an inferno. She hadn’t turned the radio back on since talking to the policeman and the only sounds in the car that Angela could hear were the whirring of the tyres on the bitumen and Ingrid breathing and Angela remembered that Ingrid sometimes suffered from Asthma and thought that it might not have been wise to bring her up the valley towards the fireground where the smoke was still heavy in the air, where the river, up in the mountains, had its source.
Ashes Remain When the
Fire has Passed
Allynsdale looked like a scene from some disaster movie or war film and there were more than a dozen fire trucks of various sizes and configurations parked in the main street at all sorts of angles and the weary crews, who obviously hadn’t changed or showered and probably not slept from the night before, were sitting on the trucks or under the verandas of the pub and the general store and they all looked, in Angela’s mind, absolutely knackered. Angela found a place to park the Subaru down passed the pub, just outside the tennis courts and the little folk museum in what had once been the district court house.
‘What now?’ Ingrid asked as they sat and looked up towards the mountains where the trees were bare and black. Across the creek, just past the ruins of Mrs Thompson’s place there were a couple of big black glossy crows circling around, low in the sky and Angela thought that it would be a picnic for the crows that survived the fire, there would be barbecued carcases of all sorts of animals for the crows to choose from, whether it be cattle and goats on the farms, or pets, or wild animals in the hills who couldn’t outrun the flames.
‘I think there’s an evacuation centre in the Scout Hall’ Angela said and pointed back up the road where there seemed to be a lot of cars outside the weatherboard and iron hall and there were people milling about and some of them were wearing bright coloured vests to indicate that they were there to perform some sort of official function.
Ingrid and Angela got out of the car and walked up the street. A couple of the locals who recognised Angela gave her a nod or a little wave, but nobody said anything. As she walked up to the front of the Scout Hall, Angela noticed that Molly Thompson was sitting on a fold up chair with a couple of brattice bags by her side that had some clothes and framed photographs in them and sitting on Molly’s lap was her little Silky Terrier and Angela was so pleased that she almost felt like weeping.
‘Mrs Thompson, I’m sorry about your house but at least you’re okay and so’s your little mate’ Angela said and knelt down in front of Molly and gave the dog’s ear a pat.
‘Scamp, that’s his name’, Mrs Thompson said, ‘Gerald from the service station found him in the house and he had conked out so Gerald got him outside and gave him mouth to mouth and he came around straight away and the vet from the Department of Agriculture just had a look at him and said he’s fine, and it was just the fumes in the smoke. Can you credit that, a man giving mouth to mouth to a little dog?’
‘I think Gerald has a kind heart’ Angela said and smiled back at Ingrid who was hovering around not sure what to do with herself.
‘I’m sorry lass, but if I did know your name, I’ve forgotten it’ Molly said and looked almost apologetic, ‘but you live up the road, don’t you, last property before Bernard’s?’
‘Bernard?’ Angela asked and Molly gave a little laugh.
‘You probably call him Killer like the locals and blow ins alike”.
‘It’s funny isn’t it?’, Angela said, ‘He was one of the first people I met when I moved here, and I speak to him almost every day, but I never knew what his proper name was. The first day I met him, he walked up to my front door and said that he was my neighbour and that I could call him Killer because everyone else does.’
It was like a rebirth, the day that Angela took possession of the keys to the little mud brick house and thanked the real estate agent in the main street of Maitland who had told her that she had managed to get a bargain and that he thought the vendors had agreed on a lower price than what the land and house was actually worth because they were sentimental and wanted the house to go to someone like Angela which left Angela to wonder what the real estate agent thought somebody like her was like. The couple who sold her the house had built it themselves in the late seventies and it had originally been their weekender until they decided to move into it permanently. David was a school teacher and Tricia was a public servant and so they both jumped at the chance to take transfers that meant that they could live in Allynsdale on a full-time basis. David managed to get a position at the Primary School in Wallisville and Tricia got a position in Maitland and told people that while it was some distance to travel, in Sydney she was used to spending an hour each way in her car but up in the valley there was an ever changing scenery as the days shortened and then lengthened and then shortened again and the colours changed with the season whereas, in Sydney, a good percentage of her hour behind the wheel was spent looking at the car in front and waiting for the traffic light to turn green and hoping that she would get through the intersection before it turned red again.
David had turned sixty-five and Tricia was not far off it and they decided that it was time to retire. Both could have left their public service jobs years before with pretty handsome retirement benefits but David told Angela, when she came to inspect the house, that he really liked teaching and loved the kids and the sense of community in the little school and he also worried that after forty years together in which they both worked full time and only spent lengthy times together when they made their odd overseas trip, that he and Tricia might have gotten on each other’s nerves. They had only just retired when David was diagnosed with a fairly aggressive cancer and had to go to Newcastle fairly regularly for treatment and even sometimes to Sydney to see particular specialists. To Angela, when she met him, David looked like a very sick man and she didn’t think he had much time. They had bought a small apartment in Newcastle with views of the ocean and Tricia settled into the role of full time carer that would only end when David got too ill to stay at home, although he kept telling her that he wanted to die at home in the mud brick cottage they had built, but Tricia was having none of it and told him that she wanted to have him around as long as she could and that meant getting good support and medical treatment.
Angela had been a bit surprised when, after she had the first inspection of the property and put in an offer with the real estate agent, she received a call from the agent saying that the vendors wanted to meet prospective purchasers because having what they called ‘the right person’ buying their hand built house was even more important to them than how much the person was prepared to pay. Angela agreed to drive up the following weekend and that’s when she had her first and only time with the people who built the house that Angela very much wanted to be her home.
The biggest challenge for Angela was getting the money together to make the purchase. She had barely any savings to speak of and the job prospects were pretty poor and besides, unless she got tenure, and she was told that wasn’t happening, it wouldn’t be worth her while to drive all the way from Allynsdale to do a couple of hours of tutoring at the university. She had an inheritance from her grandparents and being the only grandchild meant that it was fairly substantial and she was finally able to convince her father to lend her enough money to make up the balance of the purchase price but at least when the deal was done and she had the keys in her hand, she was able to say that the house was hers and not the banks or anybody else’s and she thought she could make some money doing odd jobs like cleaning and waitressing the way she had when she was at uni and hopefully there might be some local kids who need some English tutoring to help them get through the HSC.
‘Is there any news?’ Ingrid asked Molly.
‘News love?’ Molly wrinkled her brow in puzzlement.
‘About Killer, er Bernard, Angela’s been worried sick.’
Molly Thompson looked fretful and kept gazing up the road, beyond the ruins of her house which was not much more now than a tall brick chimney rising out of a pile of charred black timber and twisted and buckled sheets of corrugated iron that looked even rustier than when it had sat for years, unpainted, serving as Molly’s roof. Her old gnarled hands, with fingers twisted and bent by arthritis were stroking Scamp’s silky, freshly washed coat quite rapidly and Scamp was looking up at her, his tongue lolling and his breath panting with what Angela thought must be a doggy sort of love and she thought that with all hell breaking loose, some kind person had taken the time to give Scamp a bath.
‘I think he must be gone love’ Molly said to Ingrid and a solitary tear rolled down her face. ‘Nobody could survive that’ Molly shook her head.
‘Kevin Cutler did’ Angela said and surprised herself by the level of defiance in her voice that made Molly look at her a little startled and then she screwed up her eyes.
‘The devil looks after his own’ Molly said. ‘There’s talk that they didn’t get caught in a flame over or whatever it is they call it but found a safe passage around to the back of the fire front and then just sat it out in safety.’
The devil, Angela thought, isn’t that what The Law, not her Grandfather but the other Law, the narrator of one of Mick’s books called Michael, the Christ figure water diviner when he came to the little town in the desert? No, she remembered, The Law called Michael Lucifer and for some reason, Angela always related Lucifer much more to hellfire than she did the Devil, or Satan, or Beelzebub, or the Anti-Christ, or the Dark Angel or whatever other name people used to describe the force that was the opposite of goodness. Maybe the association with Lucifer and hell fire had something to do with the way that her grandfather used to use the name Lucifers for the matches that he would strike to light his pipe and she remembers him patting his pockets and looking down the side of his armchair and on the coffee table and the side table where he kept his pouch of tobacco and his ashtray and the little silver tool her used to clean out the bowl of his pipe, scraping off the thick black tarry deposits, and when he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he would call out to Angela’s grandmother and say ‘have you seen my lucifers’. Her grandmother would bring in a fresh box of matches from the kitchen and Angela’s grandfather would point to the picture of the lady on the box of matches and say ‘they should call them Angela’s because they’ve got a picture of you on the box’ and, sure enough, there was a woman with scarlet hair on the matchbox and Angela would giggle and laugh and say ‘that’s not me’.
‘That’s rot Molly and you know it’ said a male voice from behind Ingrid and Angela and Angela turned and saw that the voice belonged to Rodney Cripplegate, who was a councillor on the local shire and drove the school bus that took the high school students down to Maitland each day for their studies.
‘You’re probably right’, Molly said, ‘but when I heard it, I wanted to believe it.’
Angela didn’t know how many people disliked Kevin Cutler and she thought it might have just been her and Killer, but it was apparent that for the self-proclaimed Mayor of Allynsdale, there were a number of people who would be happy to see him lose his crown.
‘Have you registered inside, Angela?’ Rodney asked and Angela was taken aback at first that he even knew her name because she couldn’t remember ever exchanging more than three of four words in the last five years and even then, it was probably just a polite ‘excuse me’ or the like when they were both in the general store.
‘I was just about to’ Angela said and smiled at Molly.
‘Good,’ Rodney said, ‘Nobody knew where you were and they all assumed that you were dead, up there in the fire. We’re waiting for the ok from the police and fire bosses to go and search for bodies.’
‘Anila from the servo knew that I was leaving town. I spoke to her yesterday on my way out’ Angela told Rodney.
‘Yair, well you could have changed your mind and come back and besides, you know how that lot get things confused and mixed up,’ he said with a sneering curl to his upper lip.
‘What lot?’, Ingrid, who had met Anila a couple of times when she was visiting, asked, ‘service station proprietors?’
‘And who are you anyway?’ Rodney said, stepping forward so that Ingrid thought he was about to push his pumped-up chest into hers. ‘This is a disaster zone and we don’t need rubber neckers from the city coming to gawp.’
